[tz] Timezone in Brazil

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Fri Oct 9 17:57:38 UTC 2015


MARCIO IKEDA wrote:
> It seems that Brasilia city which is the capital, is only treated as a metaZone and not a timeZone.

I'm not sure what a metaZone is -- that word is not in the tz data, and the word 
"Brasília" is only in the comments. I assume these concepts are coming from some 
downstream copy of the database, and if so you may need to write to whoever is 
maintaining the downstream copy.

The tzdata names typically come from the largest city in a region where clocks 
have agreed since 1970. This is not necessarily the capital of the region. For 
example, tzdata names include America/New_York (not America/Washington_DC) and 
America/Shanghai (not America/Beijing). The name America/Sao_Paolo follows this 
convention.

By the way, inexperienced users are not expected to select these names unaided.
Distributors should provide documentation and/or a simple selection
interface that explains the names; for one example, see the 'tzselect'
program in the tz code. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
<http://cldr.unicode.org/> contains data that may be useful for other
selection interfaces. If your users are expecting a phrase like 'Horário de 
Brasília' and are seeing something else, I suggest writing to the CLDR 
maintainers to get that fixed.

This is all explained in the Theory file, and you can read its latest 
(experimental) version here:

https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/Theory



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